There are a couple of distinct price tiers to seafood in Japan. Squid and octopus tend to be very budget-friendly, with a step up in price for sashimi-grade tuna and salmon. Among the most premium offerings of all is where you’ll find salmon roe, or ikura as it’s known in Japanese.

Due to its high cost, ikura is usually served in modest quantities, sometimes seeming more like a garnish than a legitimate component of the meal. However, that’s not the case at these four Tokyo restaurants, which dish up such generous portions that their ikura literally overflows the bowl.

I love gyoza, the pork and garlic-packed dumplings that you can find in diners, ramen joints, and grocery stores across Japan. Seriously, when the Japan Gyoza Association released an ad that was just a dude running around with a delirious grin saying, “Aha! Gyoza! Ahaha!” it seemed, to me, like the most natural reaction in the world to the little wrapped bits of deliciousness.

Really, the only complaint I have about gyoza is that I don’t have a freshly cooked batch in front of me right now. With a solution to that problem, here’s a video of how to make gyoza in just three seconds, without using a microwave.

For a time, shopping for electronics was just about the only thing to do in Tokyo’s Akihabara neighborhood. In recent years though, the area has gone through a renaissance, and it’s now packed with restaurants and cafes, too.

Of course, just because your feet are tired and your throat is parched doesn’t mean you’re ready for the excitement to stop. So if you’d like to mix some thrills in with your cafe time, how about stopping in for a drink or snack at a restaurant that’s sandwiched between the tracks of one of the busiest train lines in Japan?

As a girl who has been playing video games almost since birth, it’s sometimes annoying to be pigeon-holed along with other girls who have no interest in or understanding of video games. As just another medium of entertainment – and one with vast scope for artistic expression at that – I’ve never quite understood people who claim that they “don’t get” games. That’s like saying that you don’t “get” movies, books, or music; there’s bound to be some genre out there for you! Still, it’s probably fair to say that more guys play video games than girls, and there are a lot of girls out there who really don’t like it when their boyfriends pay more attention to their games than to them.

Today we’d like to bring you the comic tragedy of a ridiculous couple in Japan whose relationship ended up in the toilet, all over something as simple as a mobile game…

Police paid a visit to an eatery in the America Mura area of downtown Osaka after several images of a restaurant advertising improvised incendiary bombs known as Molotov cocktails began floating around on Twitter.

Sure enough, in front of the restaurant sat a plastic box with eight beer bottles stuffed with cloths and a sign that read Molotov Cocktails: One for 100 yen (US$0.84).

It’s sort of disheartening to think that you can spend countless hours and huge sums of cash working on your cosplay creation, getting the outfit looking just like it does in the original work, yet still end up looking nothing like the character you’re trying to emulate. That’s because many iconic anime and video game figures have iconic figures themselves, with physiques that often range from difficult to impossible to replicate in real life.

Leading anime ladies, for example, tend to be rather buxom. But if your DNA didn’t deem D-cup would be your natural bust size, one designer has come up with a silicone-free solution: a literal breastplate.

The people of China have once again been gifted with some free live entertainment, in the form of another over-the-top public outburst. Last week, it was a wife going nuts at her husband for buying over-priced baby formula, but now the playing field has leveled, and we have what almost looks like a scene straight from a TV drama as acouple gets into a heated argument in the middle of a subway station.

But what on earth would cause someone to lose their cool like that in front of a crowd of people?

While food safety problems are unfortunately common in China, one outraged Chinese netizen recently shared a new kind of trouble jeopardizing food: humans. The poor victim only wanted to send some snacks from Japan back to China, but when the package finally arrived, it was found to have been completely ransacked by someone on the way. Postal services and customs are our only way to transport items from one place to another without travelling, so when a breach of trust like this occurred, it led many Chinese netizens to ponder upon the meaning of civilization.

What would you do if you came face to face with a frantic water buffalo in the middle of the city?

As unlikely as it seems, a number of pedestrians and drivers witnessed that exact scenario in downtown Chengdu City, China in the afternoon on Thursday, January 29 . The escaped animal caused quite a panic and was only stopped after prolonged police intervention.

Warning: Some readers, especially animal lovers, may find some of the following graphic pictures difficult to stomach. Be wary if you’re squeamish about seeing blood, too.

Shoemaker Nike owes its success as much to the marketing that backs its footwear as the science behind it. But as one of the biggest athletic apparel companies on the planet, the Nike swoosh is hardly a rare sight these days, so if the Oregon-based company really wants to catch people’s eyes, it has to get a little more flamboyant with its designs.

That’s as true in emerging markets as it is in established ones, which is why Nike’s new pair of kicks made especially for China might be the wildest the company has ever made, and come packed with all sorts of imagery meant to make sure fortune smiles on theirs wearers while everyone is looking at their feet.

Ever felt like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done? Whether you’re working, a parent, a student, or all of the above, it can be tough trying to fit all the things that need to be done into your daily schedule. But after a Japanese magazine gave us a peek into the day of one Japanese working mother, we’re not sure whether to be in awe of all that she manages to accomplish, or to question her sanity.

Hamburger chain Lotteria has to walk a difficult tightrope. On the one hand, it’s got its reputation as the mad scientist of the Japanese fast food industry to uphold, meaning it needs a sizeable roster of unusual, outlandish, or just plain massive sandwiches on offer. On the other hand, in order to ensure each item has plenty of impact and novelty factor, the chain doesn’t want them hanging around on the menu so long that customers start to get bored with them or take them for granted.

As a result, most of Lotteria’s most interesting items are only available for a limited time, sometimes as short as a single day. But just in case you missed your chance to try one, Lotteria is bringing back just one of its special sandwiches from last year, and its letting fans decide which by tallying the number of Yahoo! searches for each of the candidates.

KFC launched its Double Down menu item in 2010, and after it sunk in that the fast food chain was serious about making a bacon and cheese sandwich with two pieces of fried chicken substituting for the bread, reactions were split between horrified and hungry. All agreed though that the decadent offering was in no way to be mistaken for a healthy dining option, and many commentators declared it the sort of thing that could only have been birthed in response to the extra-gluttonous fast food culture of the U.S.

Except it turns out that Americans aren’t the only ones who occasionally like to go crazy and stuff themselves with as much KFC-cooked meat as their mouths and stomachs can hold. The Double Down was also a sales success in Korea, and this week, KFC launched an evolved version in the Philippines called the Double Down Dog.

For many people, Moscow, covered in snow, is the first thing that springs to mind when they think of Russia. But while that’s certainly an iconic image, it’s but one view of the largest country by land mass in the world. Russia stretches far from both east to west and north to south, encompassing a variety of ecosystems and climates, and not all of them look like snowy Red Square.

Some places are actually a lot colder. Take, for instance, the town of Dudinka, where a busted water main turned a street into a solid block of ice, encasing cars parked along the road like flies trapped in an ice cube.

When you look at them a certain way, huggy pillows with pictures of cute anime girls on them are kind of creepy. Well, actually, they’re creepy in several ways, but for right now, let’s limit our discussion to one way in particular.

Even if we accept that there’s nothing wrong with consensual love between a man and his pillow, their relative sizes make the situation kind of weird. After all, a person’s height is far greater than a pillow’s length, so wouldn’t Miss Anime Pillow feel a little awkward cuddling with her much larger otaku owner?

It’d probably be a little like squeezing a gigantic anime pillow that’s six meters (19.7 feet) long. Of course, if that sounds like your personal vision of bedtop bliss, there’s a company giving away just that.

When entering the grounds of a Shinto shrine in Japan, it’s customary to first stop by the water basin near the gate and rinse your hands, and sometimes your mouth, in order to cleanse them. Water isn’t the only classical element held to have purifying properties in Shintoism, though, since the same can be said about fire.

Obviously, worshippers aren’t called upon to put fire on their palms or inside their mouths. Instead, Shinto priests light pyres of charms and decorations during the Dondo Yaki ceremony, with the towering blazes regularly reaching 15 meters (49.2 feet) into the air.

In a lot of ways, convenience stores in Japan are more like miniature supermarkets. So while they still sell a lot of the candy and canned beverages their counterparts in other countries specialize in, you can also find plenty of edible, even gourmet-sounding food.

For example, the chain FamilyMart sells pouches of fried scallop meat, specifically the mantle, or part of the animal that attaches it to its shell. There’s a certain level of risk that comes with eating any mass-produced foodstuff, though, as one customer found out when he found what he felt was a foreign object in his pack of marine mollusks. And while generally the only thing you want to find in your food is, well, food, we suppose if we had to find something else mixed in there, we’d want what he discovered hiding in his snack: a pearl.

With his stylishly coifed hair, affected pose, and outlandish outfit, you could at first mistake the man in the above photo for a model. And given how ridiculous his getup is, you might find it only natural that his face is concealed, because honestly, even if you were getting paid for it, it’d still be kind of embarrassing to be seen dressed like this.

Except, that’s no fashion shoot, but a photograph taken by Chinese customs authorities who caught the would-be smuggler trying to sneak a huge quantity of smartphones into mainland China in one of the clumsiest ways possible.

One of the great things about curry is how versatile it is. The standard way to eat the spicy dish in Japan is with carrots, potatoes, onions, and pork, but you can also toss in chicken, shrimp, beef, or tuna. Things are wide open when it comes to vegetables, too, with some people opting for eggplant, spinach, or tomatoes.

But why limit yourself to just meats and veggies? One curry restaurant in Tokyo feels its menu should be inclusive of the entire food pyramid, and will fix you a plate of curry rice that represents the fruit and dairy groups in the forms of curry with strawberries and even ice cream.

A story out of Saitama Prefecture almost sounds like the script to a heartwarming movie. In an apartment house in Kawaguchi City, until a few days ago, two senior citizens were living next door to each other. The men shared a love of beer, and since they were both living alone, would even sometimes pass off their excess food to one another if they happened to buy too much at the grocery store.

Sure, 64-year-old Shingo Tsutsui didn’t like the noise his 70-year-old neighbor made walking around the hardwood floors of his thin-walled apartment, but that little bit of cantankerousness just adds to the Odd Couple-like appeal of the story, doesn’t it? Or at least it would, if Tsutsui had responded by contorting his face into comically frustrated expressions instead of what he actually did, which was to attack his neighbor with a kitchen knife.

As shocking as that is, though, it’s not nearly as unexpected as the victim’s reaction: inviting his attacker in to have a couple of beers together.